Friday, September 28, 2007

Inflating a Little Man

Well, at the top of the list are our old friends the neoconservatives, the folks who provided the intellectual rationale for Bush's war in Iraq, many of whom are now itching for a war with Iran. Norman Podhoretz, the neocon paterfamilias, has written a trifle called World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism and loves to posit Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden—a far more dangerous character—as the heirs to Hitler and Stalin. "They follow the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism," he writes. This is incendiary foolishness. Terrorists have the ability to wreak terrible damage intermittently, but they don't represent an existential threat to the U.S. Ahmadinejad commands no legions—not even the Hizballah forces in Lebanon that attacked Israel in the summer of 2006—and if Podhoretz doesn't know that, he should. Taking Ahmadinejad literally, as the neoconservatives do, is being disingenuous with lethal intent. It gives license to a conga line of politicians—especially Republicans running for �President—to strut their stuff by jumping on Ahmadinejad and Columbia University and liberals in general. Mitt Romney runs an ad in which he brags that he denied the milquetoast reformer Khatami a police escort to Harvard University in 2006. Now there's a man! The New York Daily News, owned by neoconservative Mort Zuckerman, runs the headline the evil has landed. The cable news networks hyperventilate. Even the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, feels the need to demolish Ahmadinejad — elegantly, I must say — before the speech. A giant toxic bubble overwhelms the public square.

And then, there he is — and laughter is freedom's only appropriate reaction. The bubble bursts. He denies not only the Holocaust but also homosexuality? Suddenly, it all becomes obvious: We are being played by extremists on both sides. To be sure, Iran does arm Hizballah, and it does have an active nuclear program that may or may not be proved to have hostile intent, and it is making trouble for the U.S. in Iraq, supplying weapons to our enemies. These are all problems to be addressed soberly and perhaps even, eventually, with multilateral force. But the neoconservative campaign to transform Ahmadinejad into Hitler or Stalin, to pretend that he has the ability to destroy the world, to make a hoo-ha over letting the little man speak, is a cynical attempt to plump for war. Ahmadinejad may be ridiculous, but Podhoretz—who recently spent 45 minutes with Bush arguing for more war—isn't very funny at all.

Just to show what a schmuck this nitwit is he publishes the crap of David Berlinski in his rag, Commentary Magazine. In a discussion of Berlinski, Richard Dawkins said that anyone who disbelieves in the theory of evolution is either ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked (but he didn't want to consider that). Berlinski, in Dawkins' opinion, was neither ignorant, stupid or insane.

The envisioned threat from terrorists have mainly been that they may cause major disruptions of social structure by relatively easy means.

That has not been born out yet, and most of the minor disruptions are from overly aggressive protective actions. (Read: Iraqi war and flight security.) The body of society has an allergic reaction, and we need to find an antihistamine.

Torbjorn, you are squeaking by, but if you want to polish your framing, you will need professional help.

It "has been established" by those who have taken the training (remember EST and Werner Erhard?)that only the annointed know how to administer the mystical spells and powers of FRAMING - bacon, bacon, bacon.

In retrospect, I feel ahmadinejad's invitation to columbia was more of a circus than a fruitful exercise in free speech. Yes, the guy is a totalitarian.But what if George Bush were invited to an Iranian university? They could fling him some pretty uncomfortable questions too. Do you think Iranians would have stooped to introduce him to the audience as a "petty dictator", as they did in columbia?

I think this says some scary things about how what americans truly thinking about "free speech". In this case the president of columbia was SO fucking AFRAID of been called an antiamerican, he made this more of "an opportunity to come and laugh at the dictator".

I think Columbia ultimately reinforced the feelings of those who want Iran invaded. The opportunity was not seized to touch on profound topiocs. Irna is a people, and a people with a history in a conflicetd region. This is the reality that neeeded to be discussed; whether the gays in Iran get proper treatment or not...I wish they did but this, really,is NOT be a central point: other much more deadly and urgent problems must be attented to and solved first.

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.